


to feel good in the morning

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Espionage, F/F, First Meetings, Flirting, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27092842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: In 2004, the Winter Soldier shoots Natasha in Odessa and dumps her body in the Black Sea. She wakes up a week and a few hundred miles later on the coast of Turkey.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia (The Old Guard 2020)/Natasha Romanov (Marvel)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 81
Collections: Fic In A Box





	to feel good in the morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saiditallbefore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this! The pairing was such a great idea I'd never thought of.
> 
> Title from "Parade" by Garbage.

Natasha dreamed about drowning. She was locked in an iron coffin at the bottom of the sea, the water rushing in and out of her, the water an eternity around and above and throughout, the water all she could remember. She drowned, and woke, and drowned again.

She woke up and she was still drowning. For a moment reality bled into her nightmares and she nearly gave up. But in the dream, she had been locked in a box, far from any memory of sunlight. The water here was shallow; she could see the sun through her crusted eyes.

And she could move. She realized it just as she realized she wasn't entirely free. Her lungs ached, and she felt like her chest would burst, but she forced herself to lock her lips together and move her hands, to tear at the tape securing her wrists to her legs. There should have been weights, keeping her body from drifting, but the tape was torn at the ends. She tore the bonds apart, forcing herself not to inhale water - more water? - and to think, until finally she was loose, kicking upward, struggling, frantically, for the surface.

It was much closer than she would have guessed. Her head broke through, and she gasped in air. She would have thought her lungs would be full of water, but she breathed easily, readily, as though she had only been swimming and panicked because she had miscalculated a dive; as though she had never drowned at all, and it was only a dream.

She could breathe. She wasn't taped to a handful of concrete blocks at the bottom of the ocean. Where _was_ she?

Natasha treaded water and looked around. More luck: the shore was nearby, or at least, reachable. She didn't see any people, any good sign of where she had come from or ended up, only agricultural fields. But memory was returning now that the panic had retreated.

She hadn't drowned. One of her hands went, automatically, to her stomach, to the skin that was -

Smoothly unbroken, despite her memories of trying to hold it together with her hands.

"That _bastard_ shot me," Natasha hissed out, voice rasping as she remembered. "And the engineer--"

Dammit. She'd _liked_ him, too. Natasha sighed, and started swimming for the shore.

She still didn't know where she was, except that it wasn't Odessa, or probably Ukraine at all. There was no sign of the car, no sign of the cliff, no sign of the engineer, and definitely no sign of the Winter Soldier, unless you counted the shreds of tape still clinging to Natasha's bare skin. The plants, Natasha determined when she reached land and could look closely, were tea. Did they grow tea in Ukraine? She wasn't sure, but she didn't think so. 

The instinct to fish out her phone and find out was killed by the fact that she didn't have her phone, or her passport, or her shoes. She was dressed in the tattered remnants of her cargo pants and a sports bra; the clothing that hadn't come off underwater, presumably.

Natasha made a face at herself. She had become way too dependent on the internet recently. 

She was on the shoreline of the Black Sea... somewhere. She was also half-naked and without any means of contacting SHIELD, or any money. She looked around for any buildings in sight, and not finding any, picked a direction on the coast more or less at random and started walking.

Someone in good condition, used to walking and in fair weather, could do twenty or thirty miles a day. Natasha, barefoot, disoriented and in unfamiliar territory, wasn't sure exactly how far she made it but it wasn't close to that. Something like two hours after she woke, judging by the progress of the evening sun towards the horizon, she reached a road, and helpfully, it had a sign.

She couldn't read the sign. But she could identify the language on it: Turkish. There were numbers on it. They would have been more helpful if she knew what they meant in context.

The bastard had dumped her body from a boat. He had to have; she wouldn't have drifted from Odessa all the way to Turkey quickly or from shallow water. She tried not to think about just how long she had been under for that to happen. 

It wasn't like there was a _good_ explanation for waking up underwater, intact, and with the boat nowhere in sight, before she also knew she'd drifted several hundred miles underwater. She just had to get back to SHIELD and then they would figure it out. Assuming SHIELD tried to figure it out, instead of transferring her to an experimentation project.

Natasha remembered vaguely that a lot of the Turkish Black Sea coastline was mountainous, and felt grateful, at least, to have woken up somewhere she could walk to the road. It would have been nice if she had a good enough map in her head to guess where that was. She might have made a guess at what was edible if she had been in Russia on the _other_ side of the Black Sea, or even the east coast of the US, but Turkey... she didn't feel confident she could avoid poisoning herself.

Maybe she'd come across a car. She'd tell them... That she'd shipwrecked, maybe, she thought, gritted her teeth, and started hiking again.

It was already night time, and she didn't come across a car for several more hours until it was obvious she had to stop. Her feet were bloody and blistered, and the moonlight was not enough to protect them even on the road. It seemed like an immense oversight to Natasha that all of her training, from SHIELD to the Red Room, had assumed she would have access to clothing and basic equipment even if she had to steal a car or money. 

She knew how to make a fire without matches in an emergency, at least, so she camped a ways off the road and did that. She fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed again.

This time it wasn't the woman at the bottom of the sea. Instead, she saw another woman, another stranger, this one in the backseat of a jeep going off road. There was a man in the driver's seat cursing in Arabic and Italian, while another one shoved at his shoulder. A third man sat across from the woman in the back, trying to read a book with pages that bounced and fluttered, but Natasha's eyes were on the woman. 

In the dream she felt that they looked directly into each other's eyes. The woman's face changed, and Natasha felt that she had seen her. On a job that should have made her feel exposed, threatened, but instead she felt supremely confident. The woman was coming for Andy, it would be okay.

"The sign," she heard the man in the passenger seat say up front. "It was Turkish, wasn't it?"

"Ordu," the woman said; her eyes were no longer on Natasha, who felt somehow abandoned. "It was a distance to Ordu. It's on the Black Sea coast."

"What's in Ordu?" asked one of the men.

"Mostly hazelnuts," said the woman, thoughtfully.

A city, Natasha thought, and woke up; and wondered if the dream was true.

She wondered if it mattered. The only thing she could do was follow the road.

The next morning was pretty bad. She was hungry and tired and thirsty, and the blisters hurt worse the second day. "People used to do this all the time, Romanova," she muttered, but of course, people who used to do this all the time had had callouses. And not just boot callouses like the ones she had ground out of existence. 

At least no one was chasing her. Any reasonable person would think she was dead after dumping her corpse off a boat off Odessa. The Winter Soldier might not be reasonable but he probably wasn't going to think she had come out of the sea alive in Turkey. She wasn't being chased, and she was on a road, one maintained by people, and roads went somewhere. Sooner or later she would get to a place where she could tell them she was a lost American tourist who'd fallen out of a tour boat, and they would find her clothing and ship her to a US embassy, where she would call Clint and be laughed at.

This was going to make a really fantastic story for nights out in about six months, Natasha told herself. Fantasizing about it took her mind off her feet. She tried not to think about what she would tell SHIELD about the shooting, about whether or not she should lie.

It wasn't the first time she'd been in the wilderness alone. When she had been ten, the Red Room girls had had a wilderness survival exam that involved being dumped in Siberia in pairs for three weeks. But they'd also been equipped with coats, and tents, and guns. Still, Natasha told herself, Turkey in summer was a lot more hospitable to human life than Siberia in January.

She felt the vibrations of a vehicle coming up the road before she heard it or saw it. Her instinct was to dive from the road and hide, but she _wanted_ to be seen; she turned, quashed all of her instincts to jump to the side - what if it was the only car and it didn't stop? - and stood straight in the center.

The jeep from her dream turned a bend in the road and braked. Natasha's mind went utterly blank. She only stared at it, making eye contact with the driver, the man who had been reading in her dream, as the vehicle came to a slow halt in front of her.

"Oh," Natasha said, softly, and watched. The door opened, and the woman who had looked at her in her dream swung out the side and came over. She was wearing dark jeans, a dark shirt, a tactical backpack, and boots. Way better dressed for scrambling around the Turkish countryside than Natasha, in other words.

"She's really barefoot," the woman called. Natasha blinked before the men started laughing, and her starved, tired mind registered she hadn't been talking to Natasha. "You know," she said, coming closer, "You've come twenty damn miles since that sign - was it yesterday for you, too? We were looking for you ten miles away.

"Looking for me," Natasha repeated. Then she said, "You're real."

If this was some supervillain bullshit and they put her in a cage or brought out the evil bats she was going to punch someone, and then maybe cry until she found food. She wanted a goddamn hamburger, which was probably the most American thing she'd ever thought.

"I'm real," the woman said, and stopped just a few feet away, eyes on Natasha. Natasha felt her stomach lurch at those eyes in a way that was not related to emptiness and thought, could we wait until we know this isn't supervillainry first? 

"I'm Andromache the Scythian," the woman said, and held her hand out. "But you can call me Andy."

That actually rang a bell. They'd had normal Russian school lessons along with the espionage. "You look good for two thousand and a bit," Natasha said, and because why not, if they were out to get her they probably knew, "I'm Natalia Romanova. Most people call me Natasha."

The others whooped with laughter. "She's a few times that," the Arab guy said, the one who had been driving in the first memory. "But she got you there, Andy."

Andromache told the guy to do something improbable in French, then said, "It's nice to meet you, Natasha. This jerk is Joe, that's Nicky with him, and Booker behind the wheel."

"It's nice to meet you," Natasha said. Probably not supervillains, okay. "What the hell is going on? And do you have food?"

They exchanged glances. Natasha tensed, seeing those looks. Then Andy said, gently, "We felt you die."

"Yeah, I know," Natasha said, although she felt like all the wind had been knocked out of her. "Asshole shot me and dumped me in the Black Sea. What day is it?" she said. 

Oh, hell. They probably thought she was dead at SHIELD.

"That was a week ago," Andy said. "It's the eighteenth."

" _Damn_ it," Natasha said, and a few other, choice things in Russian, and repeated out loud, "They must think I'm dead."

Another exchange of glances. "You're Russian?" Nicky said.

"American," Natasha said, because she knew that meant, Are you KGB? "I was born in Russia." She glanced between them and repeated, emphatically, "What's going on?"

"Get in the jeep," Andy said, "We'll talk on the way into the city." Natasha hesitated, and she said, "We have food."

Damn it. She could always hijack the jeep. She went.

Up close, once she had a borrowed jacket over her bare shoulders and a bottle of water and a few granola bars, she could see that the woman - Andromache - was not just beautiful but also exhausted. She watched almost too closely while Natasha devoured the food and barely refrained from licking her fingers, until Natasha finally asked, "I don't remember waking up after being dumped until the last time. Did you dream about that, too?"

"Sometimes you don't remember very well, if it's quick enough," Nicky said from the front seat, slowly. "And it takes longer to heal, the first times you die."

"I was afraid," Andy said, quietly, "That we wouldn't be able to find you in the Black Sea."

Natasha thought of her first nightmare, about being trapped for eternity in a much deeper ocean, and shivered.

Then she said, "You said the first time? So you know what happened to me."

"We know some things," said Joe.

"The four of us," Andromache said, and took a deep breath, "Are immortal. We don't know why. But all of us died, one day, and woke up again. And we're still doing it. We dream about each other - other immortals - until we meet."

"We're meant to find each other," Joe said.

"Oh," Natasha said, softly. 

There was something hammering in her chest, something she tried hard to suppress.

In the Red Room you were always part of a whole, part of the group, with a glorious destiny. She had known it was a lie by the time she was a teenager, but it had been hard to leave that behind, hard to be just Natasha, with her own decision making and her own two feet. She'd wanted SHIELD to be a replacement; to be something more than what it was, which was a job, where she had friends, and missions she wasn't always sure were better, and orders that didn't always make sense.

On the one hand, this felt a little like a line she was being sold. On the other hand, unless one of these people was the Winter Soldier, they weren't the ones who'd shot her and dumped her in the Black Sea.

"Meant to find each other, how?" she said. "By who?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Andy said, bitterness in her voice, and turned to stare out the window.

Natasha wondered who the woman in the iron coffin had been; but this wasn't the time to ask. You led up to a question like that if you wanted answers from a mark. Instead she took another drink of water, and said, "Even if you're older than the Scythians, are you really from Russia?"

"The north coast of the Black Sea," Andromache said, after a long silence.

"So am I!" Natasha said, making the delight genuine in her voice and in her mind. "I was born near Rostov."

So her file had said. She didn't remember, she'd been a baby, and maybe it wasn't true. But Andromache turned her head slowly, towards her. 

There was a tension there, something Natasha didn't understand between Andromache and the others, something she felt instinctively how to hook and use.

"Do you know horses?" Andy said.

"A little," Natasha said, which was true. They'd been taught the basics of a lot of weird skills in the Red Room; and a year ago she had gone undercover at a racetrack in the United States for SHIELD.

"I can teach you more," Andy said. "If you want."

"I'd like that," Natasha said, and bumped her shoulder against Andy's on purpose, reaching for another granola bar. She felt the tension around her break like the ice over a river in the spring, although she still didn't know what was behind it.

"You said you're American," said Booker from the driver's seat. "Your family moved there?"

Natasha winced. "Not exactly," she said, carefully. She didn't trust them enough to tell them the details - not yet - but she added, feeling the truth like a line drawn from her, even though she wasn't sure what the truth was half the time, "I don't have a family."

"Well," Booker said, and laughed, harshly. "She'll fit in great, boss."

"Boss?" Natasha said.

Andromache swallowed. "I lead the group," she said, quietly. "These are all of the immortals we know of. We try to help the world. Do some good."

"That sounds familiar," Natasha said, and because she could feel Andromache's desire to touch her like a mark's, and because she was already wearing her jacket, and a little just because she was tired and cold and lonely, she leaned back in the seat. When she closed her eyes a few minutes later she made sure to sag against Andy's side.

A few miles further down the road, she felt Andy's arm slide around her shoulders, holding her there, and she smiled a little, as though it was in her sleep. A few miles after that, Andy brushed hair out of Natasha's face, and said, quietly, "You're very pretty, you know," in Russian.

"Mm," Natasha mumbled.

"And I know you're faking." Andromache brushed more hair back, while Natasha deliberately did not go stiff in her arms. "But it's alright. You're very good."

"Of course I am," Natasha said in Russian. "I'm the best. You're going to try to recruit me for your immortal army later, aren't you." She wasn't sure how she felt about that. She wasn't sure how she felt about SHIELD, still, but she had - or had tried to - built a life for herself there. There were people, responsibilities, she couldn't just vanish from.

"I'll save the pitch for when you're awake and dressed," Andromache said, and patted her hair.


End file.
